The Elastos Foundation announced the commencement of three major developments on August 25th at our One Year Anniversary Event in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Merge mining with Bitmain, the Alpha release of the Elastos Smartweb, and the official launch of Cyber Republic are all live.

Merge Mining with Bitcoin

The first announcement comes more than three months ahead of schedule: ELA can now be merge mined with Bitcoin via Bitmain’s BTC.com mining pool.

Rong Chen said of the announcement,

“ELA is one of the first coins to be merged mined with Bitmain. This partnership serves as an affirmation of the strength of the Elastos community and technology. The accomplishments in our first year alone are indicative of Elastos’ potential to make waves far beyond the blockchain space — we are on track to change the whole internet industry, its users, digital ecosystem and to create an industrial strength IOT network. This is the internet of the future, where people will own their data, and connect directly and securely.”

BTC.com is the world’s leading provider of Bitcoin data services and solutions for miners and wallets. BTC.com is one of Bitcoin’s three biggest pools, and has long been ranked number one in computing power. Because the computational power of the BTC.com mining pool, in the initial stage of merge mining, is far greater than the difficulty requirement of the ELA network block, the ELA network will have a block time of less than 2 minutes on average. During this time the ELA network will automatically adjust block difficulty requirements and recover the average block time of 2 minutes after experiencing multiple difficulty adjustment cycles. BTC.com is a public mining pool and currently the only way to merge mine with ELA

ELA becomes one of the first coins to be merged mined with BTC via Bitmain’s mining pools, and the computational power that comes with it will help secure the Elastos blockchain and give it a true advantage and security as a foundational level in our ecosystem.

Co-Founder of Bitmain, Jihan Wu, said of the partnership, “At Bitmain, we strive to be at the forefront of recognizing new, innovative technologies in the blockchain space as well as the cutting edge teams leading the way to mainstream adoption — Elastos is one of those projects. There are very few projects we have opened our community up to, and there are currently only three merged mining with Bitmain. I have an immense amount of faith in the potential impact of Elastos, which is not limited to the blockchain space alone. We look forward to continuing to be a part of the community promoting the Elastos ecosystem.”

Elastos employs an AuxPoW+DPoS consensus protocol where blocks are mined via merged mining nodes with Bitcoin and are signed via DPoS consensus protocol. The AuxPoW is now active and DPoS is inactive and in a development stage. With consideration for supporting full consensus in the future and to avoid any major infrastructure issues, the mining pools of Bitcoin will be strategically whitelisted for merge mining. The goal is to have the complete AuxPoW+DPoS active by the end of the year. Eventually, merged mining will be open to everyone and not just Bitmain mining pools. At that point, anyone will be able to start mining ELA with their existing Bitcoin mining machines.

ELA will also be available to be merge mined with Bitmain’s Antpool mining pool in the future. More information on the start date for that will be announced in the coming weeks.

Elastos is very pleased and proud to make this announcement to the world and officially commence merge mining with Bitcoin.

Cyber Republic

A new website for cyberrepublic.org and a totally new brand were born at the anniversary. Cyber Republic is an online country where entrepreneurs and developers can join together to help build the Elastos vision and be rewarded in the native currency of ELA. This website is in its alpha version and will continue to be updated as the project grows.

Initially conceived of as a place for developers and community members to find tasks to complete and be rewarded in ELA, the new Cyber Republic is a much grander and more ambitious project. To start, the Elastos Foundation ceremoniously gave 16.5 million ELA to Cyber Republic during the Anniversary Event.

This total, nearly half the total coin supply, is more than a symbolic gesture. Cyber Republic will have full autonomy over these coins and will be able to build their own government and plans for the use of the coins. For the near future, an Interim Cyber Republic Council made up of Fay Li, Chief Marketing Officer, Kevin Zhang, Head of Development, and Yipeng Su, Chief Architect, will manage the funds and major hiring decisions for the online country. However, these are temporary posts that will evolve as the Cyber Republic Constitution is completed and a government mechanism is put in place to self-run the ecosystem with global leadership and democratically elected representatives. We hope to have our voting mechanism in place by June 2019, at which point the public will be able to start voting for the Cyber Republic Council Members and Secretaries.

Fay Li, Chief Marketing Officer of Elastos, said of Cyber Republic,

“We are starting an online country that will enable entrepreneurs and developers to democratically build the new internet, and we are giving almost half of our coins to fund it. Our first initiative for Cyber Republic is to fund the construction of 100 decentralized applications on Elastos. We are the first blockchain project to do this.”

The main initiatives announced were two projects, CR100 and Empower35.

CR100

CR100 is the flagship project of Cyber Republic, inviting teams of entrepreneurs to apply for funding to design and build the next great Elastos Ecosystem DApp. The 100 projects listed are templates that exemplify the diversity and abilities of the Elastos infrastructure.

Each project represents a different use case for a decentralized application that can disrupt the current landscape of applications. Teams are asked to use these ideas as inspirations for either their own future or existing whitepapers and to submit detailed proposals that outline their plan.

The Cyber Republic Council will select projects that are particularly promising and provide funding of 100k USD in ELA to a chosen team for 5% equity or tokens as an angel investor. Funding will be provided as milestones are hit based on the whitepaper submitted. While CR100 is designed to create variety, funding may be provided to more than one DApp in each category. Teams are also allowed to submit their own unique proposal.

This project is designed to really showcase what Elastos can do. Allowing the public to come in and submit their ideas and be supported by Cyber Republic is a pioneering project in the blockchain space that puts the philosophy of the Republic on display with real and tangible action.

The doors are open, now come and build with us.

Empower35

Empower35 is a project to select the future leaders, managers, and congresspeople of Cyber Republic. This group of experts in partnership development, marketing, business development, DApp analysis, DApp consulting, security, translation, writing, product management, media production, law, public speaking, and investment will be the first representatives that will shape and enable all future growth of the autonomous and decentralized democratic republic. In the coming weeks, CR will begin accepting applications for each role and positions will be selected by the Cyber Republic Council.

Each position comes with an annual compensation of 100k USD paid in ELA.

Responsibilities for each applicant include:

Building and leading their own teams of members with the same expertise.

Incubating the CR100 projects based on their experience.

Applying for a budget based on their proposal to manage and hire their own teams in each respective area.

Finding the next group of leaders as our Republic continues to expand and work towards our goal of full democratic decentralization.

Cyber Republic is looking for top candidates to lay the groundwork for all future growth and enable this very modern and exciting project to flourish. This is a bold and unique idea and Elastos is thrilled to support global cooperation and decentralization as we all watch the new internet be built.

Alpha Smartweb

Elastos announced that the Alpha version of the Elastos Smartweb is ready for developers.

Elastos Alpha: End to End Demo DApp Video: https://youtu.be/lSVyhhkqAP4

Here is what the Elastos Smartweb Alpha includes:

1) Elastos Runtime alpha version (Trinity browser for Android)

2) ID Sidechain (DID Verification SDK and ID Sidechain)

3) Sidechain Support (A standard sidechain node, being able to create a sidechain for your App)

4) Elastos SDK v 0.2 (Includes RPC, Elastos Carrier, Wallet, DID)

5) Wallet DApp Demo App in Trinity Browser (Demo on how to use wallet API)

6) Instant Messenger Demo DApp in Trinity Browser (Demo on how to use carrier API)

7) A blockchain game Demo DApp in Trinity Browser (Demo on how to use DID and Elapay)

8) Community Developed End to End Demo App in Trinity Browser (Demo on integrated wallet, dittobox – personal cloud drive)

This milestone is a particularly exciting one as developers can now begin to use the tools needed to grow this new, secure, and decentralized internet to support the future of the world and our heightened interconnection.

With these three milestone announcements, Elastos looks forward to the next few months and the coming global growth and strength to our projects.